A little while ago, John O’Neill posted a news item on this blog about the literary estate of R.A. Lafferty (1914-2002) being put up for auction, with the current bid being $70,000 for the copyright to all his works. It’s an odd development, but then Lafferty was an odd writer. I want to try to say something about his work here, not because I’ve read everything he’s written — I’ve read only a fraction of his output, which runs to over two dozen novels and two hundred short stories — but because he’s a writer strong enough to have hooked me to want to read more. And I want to say something about why.

Which is tricky, because that means having to identify what it is that Lafferty does that’s so intriguing. And I think much of what is powerful in his work comes from its sense of strangeness. Almost all of his writing feels like nothing else; not like a traditional sf tale, not like a New Wave tale, not like typical fantasy or horror, less like a mainstream writer trying out genre. You could say there’s something folkloric, but not mythic to it; so it’s become almost a truism to say that Lafferty wrote tall tales. It’s an accurate statement, but what does it mean?

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These past two weeks I’ve found myself writing here about science fiction, or speculative fiction, as the literature of ideas. It seems to me that ‘the literature of ideas’ implies something other than what we normally find in sf; I feel that it suggests writing that uses ideas to establish the structure of a work, instead of relying on traditional narrative. I’ve found a couple of early examples in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker and Jack London’s The Iron Heel. As a way to wrap up the discussion, I thought this week I’d look at a more recent example of what I mean by the literature of ideas: Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.

The book’s mostly set in a post-apocalyptic or at least post-industrial future, on the Pacific coast of the United States. It examines the folkways of the people called the Kesh, giving examples of their dramas and poems, examining their way of thinking and symbol-systems, and, since autobiography is one of the arts practiced by the Kesh, incidentally giving the life story of several members of the culture — most notably the extended narrative of a woman called Stone Telling. Stone Telling’s tale can easily be seen as the backbone of the book; divided into three parts, it functions as a recurring structural element that ties the mass of material together. But the book also has the feel of a well-stuffed anthology, a collection of fables and lore and myth that make the people as a whole come alive. And, as well, there are brief sections in which Le Guin herself ruminates on the difficulties and joys of writing this sort of “archaeology of the future” when the future does not yet exist, and must be imagined.

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Last week I discussed Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as an example of a true literature of ideas: a work structured not as a traditional narrative, with plot and character development as we know them, but instead built around the ideas that the work’s presenting, so that the book’s material is defined not by narrative but by the ideas at the core of its theme. As it happens, I recently stumbled across another example of this sort of thing.

Published in 1907, Jack London’s The Iron Heel is an imaginative account of North America sliding into a totalitarian society. London, a socialist, wrote the book as a cautionary tale about the oligarchs of his era. It’s an odd thing, mixing journalism and (what we now call) dystopic science fiction with economic hectoring. It’s slow going, particularly in the first half, but the climax is exciting adventure writing. You can see why it didn’t catch on, but it’s still worth looking at.

(You can read the book here, here, or over here, or listen to an audio version over here. I note there was recently a piece about the book on Daily Kos; you can find that here.)

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It’s often said that science fiction (or speculative fiction, whatever term you prefer) is a ‘literature of ideas’. I’ve never been able to agree with that statement. In part, I feel much the same way this writer does, though perhaps not as strongly; that is, to say that sf is a literature of ideas is to overlook the fact that the best mainstream literature is every bit as engaged with ideas, if not more so. Consider, say, Iris Murdoch’s use of Wittgenstein’s imagery and philosophy. Is that not writing engaged with ideas?

But I think also that there’s another difficulty with considering sf as a literature of ideas. That being: it seems to me sf very often fails to realise the promise contained in that phrase. What I mean is that ‘a literature of ideas’ would seem to imply a literature with a different structure than traditional literature; a literature with a different sense of how to shape a narrative, or how to use language. A literature actually shaped and structured by ideas, not plot or even character. I feel Murdoch goes some distance toward that sort of thing in a book like Under the Net, playing about with forms like farce and bildungsroman, and tying them together with the Wittgensteinian ideas about the representation of reality — with which, as somebody writing a basically mimetic work, she’s already engaged. What’s the science fiction equivalent of that?

It seems to me that an example of the true literature of ideas in sf is something like Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Stapledon was a novelist, but a philosopher perhaps more so; and Star Maker seems often less like a traditional narrative than an extended philosophical meditation or anthropological field report. The whole book is essentially one big infodump. But a fascinating infodump.

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